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Friday

From The Archive: Patti Smith: Dream Of Life

By Stephen Applebaum

Ever since people started calling her the “Godmother of Punk”,
Patti Smith has been out to prove there’s more to her than that. A new
film about her multifaceted life sets the record straight.

PATTI Smith’s groundbreaking 1975 debut album, Horses,
helped ignite the US punk movement, leading the New York Times to dub
the wiry performer “Godmother of Punk”. Smith herself, though, fought
against attempts to define her. The album’s iconic cover, shot by her
friend, Robert Mapplethorpe, featured Smith dressed androgynously in
men’s clothes, while the sleevenote stated that she is “beyond gender”.
Today, at 61, her thin, aquiline face may be framed by lank grey hair,
but the attitude of spiky self-determination remains the same.

“I
don’t like to be called any label,” says Smith. “My band came out
before punk rock. I like it very much, and I think it’s an important
movement, but we have always been independent.” Journalists who call
her a punk rocker “don’t have the imagination or the professional
intelligence or the curiosity to see the full breadth of what I’ve done,
and what my band has done”, she snipes.

Indeed,
as a new documentary Patti Smith: Dream of Life shows, there is much
more to Smith. Shot mainly in haunting black and white, director Steven
Sebring’s phantasmagorical “12-year slice of life” is by turns moving,
funny, and surprising, not least in the way that it contrasts Smith’s
onstage ferocity with her offstage gentleness and warmth. We see her as
poet and painter, mother and daughter, sister and wife, dreamer,
political activist and, of course, rock’n’roll animal.

“Yes,
I am a great punk rock guitar player,” Smith laughs, “but in terms of
music, the things that I aspire to are infinite.” Before the music,
however, there was the word. Smith was encouraged to read by her mother,
who gave her young daughter, among other things, a copy of William
Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience. Smith identified with the
poet who, despite poverty and misunderstanding, pursued his work with
joy. When she was 16, Smith stole a copy of Arthur Rimbaud’s
Illuminations from a book store, beginning a lifelong obsession with the
doomed poet.

“I fell in love with his face,
and I thought he would make a very good boyfriend,” she chuckles. “I
read the book, and I loved his poetry even more. I can only say that I
have had a few really great men in my life, and I consider him one of
them.”

By the early 1970s Smith, who grew up
in rural South Jersey, had moved to the Big Apple and established
herself as a poet and off-off-Broadway actress. In 1971, she performed
three poems backed by Lenny Kaye on guitar, following which she set to
forming her own band, and by 1979 had released four albums. Smith then
shocked everyone by breaking up the band and moving to Detroit to raise a
family with her husband, former MC5 guitarist Fred “Sonic” Smith.

Smith
didn’t disappear from the music scene altogether, though. In 1986 she
recorded an album (released in 1988), Dream of Life, with her husband,
for which Mapplethorpe again supplied the cover photograph. It was
their last collaboration before Mapplethorpe’s untimely death from Aids
three years later. Smith’s keyboard player, Richard Sohl, died shortly
after, followed, in 1994, by her husband, aged just 45, and brother.

Allen
Ginsberg urged the widowed artist to “let go of the departed and
continue your life’s celebration”. Bob Dylan invited her to tour with
him, and when she was looking for someone to take promotional
photographs, REM frontman Michael Stipe introduced Smith to Sebring as
someone he thought she would be able to trust, as she embarked on her
first live performances in 16 years.

“I was
trying to get my feet on the ground. I had no money, I had two small
children, I had to start all over again, and Steven really supported
me,” reflects Smith. “He became my new brother. To have the guy carting
this big, heavy camera on his back, believing in me, was inspiring to me
and helped me break through. A lot of people helped me. But, as I have
always said, more importantly, the people helped me. People seemed glad
to see me, were patient when I was nervous or a little rusty.”

The
dead gently echo throughout Patti Smith: Dream of Life, but more as
inspirations than losses. When Smith returned to New York, she was
politically sharper thanks to her husband, and became one of the first
artists to publicly oppose the invasion of Iraq. Her angry call for the
indictment of George Bush for trampling over the American Constitution
is one of the most powerful sections in the movie. Smith says some
interviewers have suggested that they should edit out footage of her
anti-war activities, because it is supposedly old hat.

“How
can they say that?” she asks bemusedly. “Nobody listened. After Vietnam
we let this happen in Iraq? Obviously people forget. So I think it’s
very important to take a stand. Sometimes you take a stand when nobody
else is taking a stand, because you have to keep the torch burning.”

And
Smith herself, who has a new album out next month, The Coral Sea, is
still burning as brightly as ever. The film is an inspirational,
passionate, humanistic portrait of a beautiful soul that at times seems
to take place in a space between the world of the living and of the
dead. Smith is filmed visiting the graves of people she knew, or who
have touched her through their work, but she insists that she is not
morbidly preoccupied with death: “I find it comforting, I know their
spirit is elsewhere but I like the proximity of something of them there.
And for people I’ve never met, such as Arthur Rimbaud, I feel some
sense of place that their remains are there and I’m there with them.

“When
I go to visit Jim Morrison’s grave, I don’t feel the dead, I feel life.
Young people go there, they make love, they smoke pot, they have a
drink. Same with my husband’s grave. I go to visit his grave, which we
did in the film, and often we’d leave him cigarettes, a shot of Cognac
or something, and I don’t think about him dead, I think about him alive.
I have good memories.”

Indeed, the clue is
in the film’s title, inspired by a line from Shelley’s poem Adonas:
“Peace, peace! He is not dead, he doth not sleep/He hath awakened from
the dream of life.”

"Your piece is one of the most comprehensive, eloquent, and powerful discussions of the film I have read." Joshua Oppenheimer, director of The Act of Killing

"Stephen, this is a fabulous piece; you did a superlative job in communicating the film and its essence." Erik Greenberg Anjou, director of Deli Man

"I have to thank you. It's a very good [Mein Kampf] article, which you have written; it reflects very sharply and especially fairly the various positions." Dr. Christian Hartmann, Institute of Contemporary History Munich